A Strange Loop writer Michael R. Jackson on creating the buzziest musical since Hamilton July 6, 2023 A surprise hit in the US, A Strange Loop has now landed a huge London run. Adam Bloodworth speaks to the man who dreamed it up while working as an usher on Broadway Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, becoming the second ever musical to win the accolade. The [...]
Pixar’s Elemental shows how the animation studio needs to work harder July 6, 2023 Elemental arrives on these shores with the unwanted title of worst performing Pixar movie. Struggling to compete with Spider-Man: Into The Spider-verse, can the family comedy drawaudiences here? It imagines a world in which the elements – earth, fire, water, and air – are people living happily in separate communities, avoiding contact with each other. [...]
Mission Impossible: Tom Cruise is back but this franchise is showing its age July 5, 2023 Barbie vs Oppenheimer may be the summer showdown everyone’s talking about, but one movie legend would like to remind you that he’s back. Despite some occasional headline-grabbing bouts of odd behaviour, Tom Cruise is one of the last true movie stars, someone who can get crowds to turn up based on his name alone. But [...]
The Super-8 Years: A compact and worthwhile film July 4, 2023 Annie Ernaux ascended to the top of the literary world following her 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, and is best known to film fans as screenwriter of 2021 award winner Happening, an adaptation of her novel. These accolades come after decades of success as a writer, the beginnings of which are examined in this short [...]
Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken review July 3, 2023 If you have children that haven’t stopped singing Part of Your World since seeing The Little Mermaid, prepare for more underwater obsession. Produced by DreamWorks Animation, the folks behind Shrek and How To Train Your Dragon, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken has a lot going on beneath its awkward title. X-Men actor Lana Condor voices Ruby, [...]
WOW!house at the Design Centre Chelsea Harbour review July 3, 2023 Sometimes your job as a writer is to critique, or nitpick – or at least to recommend improvements. At other times – and this should be done with a sigh after much internal questioning – it is to upbraid. Very rarely, your only duty is to praise and recommend – to add footfall and eyeballs [...]
A Strange Loop, Barbican, review: New York’s smash hit doesn’t land in London June 29, 2023 A Strange Loop review and star rating: ★★★ A Strange Loop won every Best Musical award in New York, and was nominated for 11 Tony Awards. It was a New York Times Critics’ Pick and won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; unusual for a musical, the accolade was previously taken by Hamilton. The musical [...]
Inside Wimbledon’s first ever official off-court fashion range June 29, 2023 “There are worse places to work,” jokes David Hewitt, Wimbledon’s head of retail. We’re on Zoom and behind Hewitt’s head there is a smart grid of green rectangles, the outside courts at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club that are primed and ready for play, days away from the start of the 2023 [...]
London has a Soho problem. We need to fix it now. June 29, 2023 It was that gloriously sleazy bard of synth-pop Marc Almond who captured it perfectly: “People come from all over the world to see this little place they’ve seen in movies and read about in history books: Soho.” Soho is London’s other Square Mile, filled not with the chatter of high finance, but with the clink [...]
Plan your Pride in London weekend with our handy guide June 28, 2023 It’s the biggest weekend in the LGBTQI+ calendar – here’s all you need to know to plan your celebrationsLast year marked the 50th anniversary of Pride in the UK, with a record 1.5m people flocking to central London to watch an estimated 30,000 event participants, from flag bearers to stewards to drag acts.This year, with [...]